1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tangible user interface, and particularly to a system and method for providing a user, by means of a tangible icon, with access to provider-selected arbitrary-sized objects on a data network.
2. Description of the Related Art
The present-day paradigm in which a person uses a discrete manifestation of “a computer” (workstation, desktop computer, laptop computer, palmtop computer, personal data assistant, game player, etc.) to relate to computation is beginning to give way to “pervasive computation”, in which computation becomes part of the environment. See W. Mark, Turning Pervazive Computing into Mediated Spaces, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 38, No. 4, 1999. The emerging relationship between people and pervasive computation is sometimes idealized as “smart space”: the seamless integration of people, computation, and physical reality.
In the present-day paradigm, there is a marked distinction between times when one is “on the computer” and times when one is not. When computation is part of the environment, it will be part of everyday physical space. Computation will be embodied in things that people ordinarily use, not in “computers”. The “Internet-ready” mobile phone is an example of this migration. Users will become far less conscious of using computation.
Changes in the present-day paradigm are already changing the approach to computation “on the computer”. The paradigm is shifting away from the form it had in the early years of the popularity of the PC (personal computer, which was introduced in 1982) when almost every PC was free-standing and independent of all other PCs, and maintained its own program and data storage. Each computer had to be equipped with a device which could read removable media, such as a floppy disk drive. For a user of a computer to have access to programs or large data files, copies of them had to be read in to that particular computer from removable media. Programs and data files are known generally and collectively by the name “objects”. An object may be generally defined as an information unit that can be individually selected and manipulated.
Now computers tend to be interconnected by networks, most notably the Internet, and to avail themselves of centralized network storage. For a user to have access to an object stored on the network, he must know and enter a universal resource locator (URL) for that object. As more and more everyday items are being stored on networks (e.g., central files of audio recordings replacing individuals' record collections) and as computing moves off of “computers” and becomes more and more distributed to users' different equipments (e.g., a music player connected to a network) which makes thinking in terms of a URL more and more abstract, and as the proliferation of stored objects requires keeping track of more and more URLs, a need arises for a way to enable a user to easily gain access to objects stored on networks.
A prior-art method to provide a user with easy access to an object is to give the user a copy of the object on some portable medium, such as a floppy disk or CD. This frees the user from having to navigate a network, but since a portable medium has an inherent maximum capacity for data, the size of an object that can be given to a user in this manner is inherently limited. According to current trends, larger and larger objects are coming into common use. For example, an audio-video presentation may have a storage size on the order of Gigabytes. It may be desired to provide a user with easy access to such a presentation, but the method of providing it on a removable medium is inherently precluded.
While the graphical user interface (GUI), which enables a user to interact with a computer by manipulating graphical icons, has gone a long way to make computation easier for non-engineers, it still represents a level of abstraction that will become increasingly burdensome as computation becomes more distributed. More recent is the concept of the tangible user interface (TUI) in which tangible, physical icons (“phicons”) are manipulated to interact with a computer. A need arises for phicons that enable a user to easily gain access to objects stored on networks, and to easily gain access to objects of arbitrary size.